We are now about a year out from Facebook’s name change to Meta, and the company’s new obsession with the metaverse is beginning to come into focus. In the face of declining Facebook revenue, Meta is throwing billions of dollars at the metaverse, which it has to force its own developers to use. A new report says CEO Mark Zuckerberg also pushed employees to have their meetings in Horizon Worlds using headsets they didn’t even have.
This was reportedly one of many directives coming down from the top of Meta aimed at increasing the use of the company’s VR products. Workers reportedly call these projects “make Mark happy” or MMH because of Zuckerberg’s conviction that the metaverse is the future of the internet. Whether or not that’s true, Meta is having a hard time getting even its own employees to use its proto-metaverse.
According to the report in The New York Times, Zuckerberg pushed managers to organize meetings in the company’s Horizon Workrooms, which is a niche within Horizon Worlds designed for meetings. It consists of a virtual conference room with everyone’s legless avatars floating above chairs. It includes features like a shared whiteboard, video chat, and screen sharing. Meta says this approach to meetings makes it easier to collaborate remotely, which is something many companies struggle with as more employees are demanding the option to work from home.
You need one of Meta’s VR headsets to access Horizon Workrooms; for example the Meta Quest 2, which recently went up in price from $299 to $399. However, multiple employees tell the times that many people at Meta didn’t even have headsets or had not bothered to set them up. When the MMH directive came down, they had to rush to purchase the headsets and get their accounts set up before managers realized what was happening.
Meta responded to the report by saying, “That’s what we’re doing because we believe the metaverse is the future of computing.” But let’s take a step back and look at the current state of metaverse technology. If you work at Meta, you have to strap half a kilogram of computing hardware to your face just to have a meeting, which is a little bit crazy. A few back-to-back sessions and your neck is going to be crying out for respite. Meta just released the Meta Quest Pro, which might be better suited for productivity and meetings, but at $1,500 it costs several times more than the Quest 2.
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